


Let it Go, Jon Snow

by hopelesspapaya



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Frozen (2013), Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: A Wight as Olaf, Also starring Cold Hands' Elk as Sven the Reindeer, Castle Black is a stand-in for Arendelle, Gen, Jon Snow is the Elsa, Parody, The Frostfangs are the North Mountain, White Walker Politics, not entirely sure where this is going, this is such a dumb premise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2019-11-03 18:04:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17882615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hopelesspapaya/pseuds/hopelesspapaya
Summary: Jon gets lost on the Great Ranging, trips, falls, and accidentally kills the Night King. The White Walkers decide it was about time they had new leadership, anyways, and transfer the title to a very unwilling and confused sixteen-year-old. Somehow, canon still sort of happens, and Jon learns to stop worrying and love the bomb.Or, the Frozen mashup you’ve always wanted, said no one ever.





	1. FROZEN HEART

**Author's Note:**

> So, the Frozen 2 trailer came out recently. Naturally this led to me re-watching the damn thing, and it occurred to me that there’s a reindeer, the mountains, and an eternal winter involved.  
> Huh.  
> Eternal. Winter.  
> HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.  
> And this was born. Enjoy.
> 
> *DISCLAIMER – there are no actual Frozen characters in this. What _will_ happen are the main beats of the movie in a Westerosi context. (It'll take awhile, though.) I apologize in advance. Comments and concrit are always appreciated! :D

 

Jon was lost. He was hideously, miserably, disgustingly lost; not quite desperately so (or so he told himself), but lost all the same. If only he’d been more vigilant in watching that Wildling girl—stupid Ygritte and her pretty, pretty face and her pretty, pretty hair—of course he’d let his guard down around her. She was beautiful, and he was young, and it was honestly to be expected that she would shake him as soon as he’d turned his back on her to take a piss.

So here he was, without a guide in the lonely wilderness of Beyond-the-Wall, hiking along atop the same blindingly white glacier he’d been trudging across for five days. He was sure it was still on the path Qhorin Halfhand had led their party on from the Fist of the First Men, but as the hours stretched longer and longer, his surety in his path grew less and less.

What was he to do? Ghost had gone off somewhere, the traitor, probably having the time of his life eating his fill of polar bear or something else. Now, he only had Longclaw to keep him company, and as the days went by that same company grew more and more wearisome, heavy like lead at his side.

The bit of jerky he’d stashed on his person had run out yesterday morning. He’d stretched the ration to last for as long as he could, but he supposed it could only go so far. It pained him to admit it, but maybe he might be starving, just a little.

What a way to go.

Jon stopped walking to heave a sigh utterly filled with melancholy, and subsequently found that his legs felt much too heavy to move. He’d frown, but his cheeks were pretty frozen. No matter what he did, he couldn’t cajole his stubborn feet to start up the trek again.

Around him, the jagged peaks of the Frostfangs glimmered in the amber half-light of late afternoon, cloaked in their ancient, sleeping silence. He’d gotten pretty high up, hadn’t he? Qhorin’s party hadn’t trekked downwards, much. Perhaps that should have been a sign from the start, he thought with resignation.

The mountains sat, and the wind howled its fury.

…And yet, no wind washed over Jon’s tired face. Something was strange. In the distance, the glacier shuddered, and suddenly a sound as sharp as icicles pierced through his ears and he cried out in pain. He jolted up from his stupor and pulled out his sword, whirling around in a daze. His eyes widened.

A crack had formed a hundred feet ahead of him. The edge of the fissure, as thin as parchment, was creeping across the surface of the ice like the stuttering path of a roach, leaving little puffs of snow and debris in its wake. The earth, inexorably, began to tilt.

Jon turned tail and ran. The cry of the glacier bit at his aching heels, and its thunder rang through his skull. Something shrieked and shattered and there was just enough time to think, _“What a way--!”_ before all his screaming thoughts fell to pieces with the ground beneath his feet.

~***~

Icicle-Wife and Crystal-Hair were idly chatting politics with the Night King on a nice little cliff with a view of the Milkwater when a bluff of snow fell from above. They thought nothing of it until it became very apparent that bluff of snow carried with it somebody with a weapon of fire, as their king was struck in the head and promptly shattered into a million bits. The five others in their little group, all of them the late king’s creations, also dropped like flies.

There was moment of silence between the two, with naught but the face-planted human culprit’s pathetic groans breaking through the cold air.

“Well,” said Icicle-Wife, “I suppose that’s one way to get rid of the old regime.”

“Confound it,” Crystal-Hair mourned loudly. “I had fifty years of political scheming all thought out already, as well! And all for nothing. I clawed my way to this damn position for absolutely nothing!”

They grumbled for a bit while the human struggled to get on his knees (and was it a he? It was hard to tell) and finally looked up. When it did (and it was best to use _it_ , to be safe), it froze, eyes huge, almost near enough to think it might have been sired by a deer.

“We will have to rethink some things,” Icicle-Wife muttered. “It’s only a matter of time before the Party’s greenseers get word of this development.”

“Damn it all. To be so far away from the capitol at this time; it will be a near impossibility to gain a foothold in the backroom dealings, now. I’d bet my last coin that the Old Man’s people will soon be digging their claws in deeper to keep their influence in the Great House.”

“The New Nationalist Party has held an absurdly disproportionate amount of influence for far too long,” Icicle-Wife sneered. “However, looking at the evidence,” and he glanced at the piles of ice beside them, “That may soon come to an end. I suppose we should be glad that so many of the Old Man’s supporters were his own progeny.”

“Brainwashed from creation and tied to his essence,” Crystal-Hair tsk-ed. “Not a very good strategy, that. In either case, we cannot allow the Old Man’s plans to come to fruition—no one _really_ wants war with the other races. No one sensible.”

“I blame it on the influx of young blood this past century. They always want glory and war and a return to the good-old-days. Bah. It’s stupidity.”

“But how can we circumvent this?”

And they looked at the human in front of them, who was very shakily holding up his fire-steel sword, now. Hm.

“Crystal-Hair. You’re the King’s Right Hand.”

“Yes?”

“How about you invoke the 98th Clause?”

“Oh, ho, that’s positively barbaric. That’s such an old, old law.”

“Ascension by conquest. It’s still valid.”

“Now that is a thought. We’d have to twist the wording, a little bit.”

“It won’t matter if we formally recognize him here and now. The transfer happens quite quickly—the gods do like efficiency in these matters.”

“Hm.”

“ _Hm._ ”

With that settled, they turned as one to peer at their convenient source of good luck and stroked their respective chins.

~***~

Jon stared at the two creatures before him, holding Longclaw outstretched in his wobbly grip, and tried his best not to hyperventilate.

One looked like it were a faerie from one of Old Nan’s tales, impossibly beautiful and eerily cold; wisps of frost clung to its whipcord form like garments made of spiders’ silk. The other was a Hideously Ugly Abomination (a phrase coined by Lady Catelyn, which she usually used to describe Arya’s embroidery), appearing much like a withered corpse bleached bone-white.

It was a thousandfold worse seeing them in the day than in the shadow of a wood in the dead of night. They were talking to each other, it seemed, but the sounds issuing from their mouths were nothing like anything a mortal man could make, nor any other mortal creature, for that matter. It prickled hatefully in his ears like needles.

What had happened? It had all been a blur between running across the glacier and falling with the ice. Things had gone about too fast for his comprehension. Longclaw had made contact with something, he knew, but he wasn’t quite sure what. Perhaps a rock, or a clump of ice.

But that wasn’t important. What was _important_ , right now, was the fact the two White Walkers were observing him curiously, and _not moving to murder him_. Obviously, this was a sign of a fate worse than death, if they weren’t going to be straightforward about it and just stick him through. A quick scan of his surroundings provided no hope for escape; at his back was the pile of icy rubble that had fallen with him, and in front of him was a sheer cliff.

It _was_ a nice view, though, he thought hysterically.

“[CLICK CLANK SCREECH],” said the pretty one, taking a step forward. Jon gulped, gripped his sword tight, and said in the most commanding voice he could muster, “ _No closer!_ ” but unfortunately his voice was hoarse from exertion and it came out like a squeak.

“[SCRITCH CRAAAWWW, CLACK CRICK],” said the hideous one, unsheathing an enormous blade of crystalline ice.

Jon was going to die. There was no question of it, but if he was going to die then by all the Old Gods he’d die with honor, and so he gave a battle-cry and charged.

The Other rolled its eyes, smacked Longclaw out of his grip like Ser Rodrik used to when Jon was ten, and kicked his legs out from under him. Jon yelped. The pretty one sauntered over, said some inexplicably formal-sounding things over him in that icy language of theirs, and then the ugly one raised its weapon and plunged it deep into his heart.

Jon made a wretched sound.

“[CRACK CLINK SCRAAAWWW],” the pretty one congratulated the other.

“[SKIR CRICK SNAP HOWL],” the ugly one grunted, removing the blade and shaking its partner’s hand.

Jon’s heart weakly twitched at the edge of perception, and it was bitterly cold. It pulled at his insides as if it were heavy stone. He glanced at the edge of the cliff, only two feet away—

“[SNAP SHRIEK CRACK SCREAM],” the ugly one laughed.

“[CRISH SNArl shrkakesh-and that should do it, my friend. One political maneuver done and over with! That’ll buy us at _least_ a year of bureaucratic nonsense in which to maneuver. What shall we do with it now, do you think—hey—!”

—and Jon hurled himself from the mountaintop with the last of his strength.

 _I am dying_ , he thought sadly as he fell. The rocky bed of the Milkwater rushed ever closer. _But if I am to die, then at least they won’t have me,_ and the ground came up and his body cracked against the stones. His head fell beneath the shallow waters, and to his surprise he coughed and spluttered and flailed his way upright.

For a moment, there was nothing but absolute elation at having gotten away. Even the sky seemed a little warmer. A bird chirped. In the next, there was animal panic, and he scrabbled at his chest with fumbling fingers. He poked a finger through the rip in his clothes—and found himself whole.

There was not a scratch on him.

Jon wiggled his finger around in there and thought, _nope._

As he ran for his life down the banks of the river, heading in any direction that was _away_ from that damned cliff, Jon decided that all this rot about dying with honor was stupid indeed, now that he was still alive. It was his duty now to warn anyone he could. A thousand whirling fears turned his thoughts into a shambles, and he had no more room in his mind left to notice he didn’t feel hunger, nor fatigue, nor even the terrible cold at all.


	2. THE HEART IS NOT SO EASILY CHANGED

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon flailing about, trying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promised myself the chapters in this fic would be less than 2000 words each, in an effort to be less long-winded. I have already failed.  
> I should also make it clear that this fic generally uses the show plot as a base timeline (since everything I know of book plot comes strictly through the wiki) with some book elements.  
> As always, comments and concrit are very very welcome! please give me feedback, even if it's just to say "u suck bro git gud" P:

 

Far in the North, the sun was setting. The crystalline edges of the Frostfangs cleaved the late afternoon sky from the earth as a knife did a pelt from a corpse. The shadow cast by those behemoths was blacker than even the space between stars; a lake of nothing beneath the gods’ feet. A bird chirped.

“…Do you think we should go after it?” Icicle-Wife mused, watching the little figure of their new king disappear behind a bend in the river. “It would seem like an important thing to do.”

Crystal-Hair gave his partner a truly hairy side-eye and said, “Even if I were to agree, does it _look_ like I could commit to a hunt like that? By the gods, man, I celebrated my thirteen-hundred-and-thirty-seventh name-day just a moon ago!”

Icicle-Wife grunted.

“Besides,” Crystal-Hair sniffed. “It’s probably best to let our little king get itself lost. Himself. Ought to start calling him that if we’re to put up a sincere front about all this. He’ll probably run south and get muddled with all those other humans there.”

“We won’t easily be able to retrieve him, later,” Icicle-Wife warned.

“Neither will the opposing parties,” Crystal-Hair nudged. “And if no one can find him, well—then the military machine will be put on hold, for lack of a general to lead it.”

The two of them shared a self-congratulatory guffaw.

“Your point is made, friend,” Icicle-Wife hummed. “Come, let’s start back. We’ve got a lot of politicking to do, and we’ve only got four hands between us to cover our Party’s asses.”

~***~

It was an ill-kept secret with the Free Folk at Mance Rayder’s camp that just north of the Skirling Pass was a small band of alpine forest populated with the fattest grouse west of the Haunted Forest. The two-day trip to this little grove was widely regarded as very much worth the effort, even if a grouse fed one and a half men at most. Sometimes, you just couldn’t beat _quality_.

On this morning, a raider and a spearwife arrived at the little forest just as the sun hitched itself above the treetops. The weather was kind, today, and the hunting would be good. Perhaps they could bag a brace of the birds, and if the gods were amenable, perhaps a deer.

With but an hour of quiet tracking, fortune shone upon them with a small covey of grouse in a clearing forty feet away. The raider raised his bow, nocked and drew. The spearwife readied her own. All was going well.

So imagine their surprise, then, when a boy clad in only woolen trousers and nothing else stumbled into the clearing and attempted to catch their quarry with his bare hands.

“What in the world…” the raider muttered, fletching still pressed against his cheek. The grouse took flight with a flurry of mocking coos.

“Dammit!” The strange boy cried, visibly restraining himself from kicking a tree.

“…Do you think he’s alright?” The spearwife whispered, also keeping her bow up. The raider snorted as softly as he could.

“How can he be? Look at him!”

The strange boy’s shoulders slumped in defeat, and he started to shuffle off. He looked very pale—nearly blue.

“…He could be a Hornfoot,” the spearwife suggested. “Gods know those crazy bastards have some sort of queer immunity to the cold.”

The raider shook his head minutely. “I’ve seen this once before. Poor fool—he must have been in the cold too long and gone mad. You start thinking it’s hot, and start taking off your clothes, if you get too cold. And at that point, you’re too far gone to save.”

The spearwife hummed. Her bowstring creaked. “We ought to put him out of his misery.”

“Aye, it would be the kind thing to do.”

So the spearwife let loose her arrow, and it struck true with an “ _unf!_ ” The strange boy fell over with a muffled thud.

The two hunters stood up and walked over to the clearing to burn the body, but to their surprise, the boy flopped over and moaned as they approached. There was a dark bruise at his temple, but no open wound. The spearwife was certain her arrow had struck him there. Stranger and stranger, yet.

The raider cautiously poked at the boy with a stick.

“Mmrph?” the boy said blearily. “Did. Did you _shoot_ me?”

“Aye, we did,” the spearwife said. “And you’re not dead. How are you not dead, anyways, from the cold?”

“I don’t know—” the boy’s eyes suddenly widened, and he blurted, “White Walkers! Just east of here. I think. I saw them!”

“ _White Walkers?”_

“Yes!”

That _was_ a development. A very important one, it seemed.

“…I feel very hot. It’s unbearably hot today… but it isn’t, is it…?”

The raider looked at the spearwife. The spearwife shrugged—and they took pity on him.

~***~

For all that the King-Beyond-the-Wall liked to call his camp an army of a hundred thousand, in truth it was an army half that size, with the other half made of Free Folk too young or too old to hold a weapon. It was not to say that other half of camp was without use; many a hedgewitch, shaman, and healer had made their home here, at the crown of the world.

In one such healer’s tent, Jon Snow was propped up next to a fire, wrapped in so many furs he looked like a lumpy bale of hay. Wrapped up with him were four or five skins of hot water, to ensure he didn’t succumb to the cold once more. Unfortunately, the water-skins felt like how it was to grab a lit lantern bare-handed, which was to say _awful_ and _burning_ , but he was starting to suspect his newfound aversion to heat was maybe a bit unnatural, so he stayed mum about that and endured.

“So, old woman,” the spearwife said. “He’ll be alright soon, yeah? How’s he fare?”

“Well, his head is a bit muddled, but that can be fixed, given how thick his skull must be.” The old woman quirked a disapproving eyebrow. “You should be glad your arrow didn’t stick him through the heart. Squishy, that.”

The spearwife shrugged. “We’d thought he was a dead man for sure, and I wanted to give him a quick death. Send someone for us when he’s ready; he’s got word for Mance.”

With that, she left the tent. The fire crackled. He didn’t have a _thick skull_ , Jon thought mulishly, and pointedly ignored how his inner arms felt like they were being roasted.

“ _Boy,_ you’re thinking!” the old woman scowled, and thrust a cup of steaming _something_ into his gloved hands. “Don’t think so much. Drink.”

So he drank. It was, as expected, horrible. It was also, as expected, much like drinking molten metal. Jon wanted to cry. A little niggling urge from between his ribs suggested, _stop resisting so much, and you’ll feel better_.

_Nope,_ Jon replied, and squashed the urge down.

“Mm. You know, boy, you may have been able to fool those two, but I can see the truth of you,” the old woman casually remarked. Jon nearly spilled his drink.

“What?”

“An arrow to the head, no matter how thick a skull, always makes for a nasty, bleeding gash. Head wounds tend to do that—bleed all over the place, look like more than they’re really worth.” She leaned in close to peer into his face. Jon shrunk back into the furs. “And the cold. You ought to be dead. You ought not to even be talking, yet here you are. It’s not natural.”

She nodded with a grunt, satisfied. Jon thought she might be scarier than Old Nan.

“You must have been touched by the Children,” she said in a hushed voice. “Saved, for some unknowable purpose.”

Jon blinked, and then he blinked again.

_…An excuse!_

“Ah. Yes. Right. That, of course.”

“No need to worry, boy,” the old healer said sagely, patting a random spot on his furs. “What the Old Gods decide is not for me to pass judgement on. I’ll say nothing. Here, drink this soup now.”

Jon hoped it was, at least, better than the drink.

~***~

Mance Rayder and Qhorin Halfhand were alone in the Great Tent, having the most intensely fought bout of staring in the history of man. Neither man spoke. No one was winning. However, all things in the world must come to an end, and so Mance broke the silence first.

“Your Crows at the Fist were massacred,” he said gruffly, and leaned back.

Qhorin’s face became dark and he clenched his shackled hands. “Your people’s doing?”

“No,” Mance grunted. “One of our warg scouts saw it through his eagle.” He took a horn mug from the table and drank from it. “You _know_ what did it.”

Qhorin was silent, save for the pensive grinding of his teeth. His gaze flicked down at his bound feet.

“I won’t try you again for numbers,” Mance sighed. “It’s clear the Wall’s not got the men to man it now.” The King-Beyond-the-Wall gave the Ranger a considering look and shrugged. “No more use for you, old friend.”

Qhorin snorted with black humor. “What’ll it be, then, eh? Boiled alive?”

“Most like.”

The Ranger bared his teeth. “I won’t go meekly.”

The King-Beyond-the-Wall raised his eyebrows. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

A small hammer was lying upon another table. Qhorin decided he might as well put all his eggs in one basket at this point, and tensed—

“Mance!” some idiot interrupted. Curses.

A raider stepped into the tent, dragging along a miserable-looking lad with a spearwife following. “This one’s got news of White Walkers,” the raider declared, and plopped the boy down on a stool.

It was Jon, wearing _wildling furs._ Gods preserve him. It could only mean he was here as a turncloak, here as a spy, or here by _accident_ , and the poor boy wasn’t the sort to think up dishonorable action on his own.

The boy caught his eye, blinked in surprise, and opened his mouth to say something profoundly stupid like _Qhorin, my fellow Brother-of-the-Night’s-Watch! I thought you were dead! I too, shockingly, am not dead! Me, a defenseless baby Crow, all ripe for the killin’ an’ eatin’! Delicious!_ So the old ranger saved his sorry skin by fixing him with the stormiest of his glares, the one that made all the new recruits at the Shadow Tower quail in their boots.

Jon shut his mouth.

“We found him just north of here, gone mad with the cold,” the raider said.

“Aye, and we got him in the head, too,” the spearwife said. “That’s that bruise there.”

Mance raised an eyebrow.

“…He’s alright _now_ , isn’ee?”

The King-Beyond-the-Wall pinched the bridge of is nose, dismissed them with a curt thank-you, and they left as they came—with complete unimportance. Qhorin kept up his glare. Jon was starting to look rather uncomfortable. Good! He could build a plausible story to cover their arses, with that! Finally, Mance sighed, and said, “Right, then. What word have you?”

“I saw White Walkers, just east of here,” Jon said in a rush. “Two of them, alone.”

“Alone?” Qhorin muttered to himself. The only lone White Walker he’d heard tell of was the one who visited Craster, the vile pox. Mance caught his eye and raised a brow. Qhorin scowled.

“East of here, eh?” The King scratched at his stubble, turning back to Jon. “Would make sense, considering the Fist.”

Jon perked up at the mention, but Qhorin redoubled the force of his glare. It worked marvelously.

“Tell me more,” Mance rumbled. “How did you come by them?”

Jon went on to describe a truly masterful exercise in getting lost in the Skirling Pass, in painful detail. Somehow, the boy had done every single thing no Wildling or seasoned Ranger would ever do. The Wildling King looked a bit dead-eyed. Qhorin himself got lost halfway through the explanation, but came to when Jon said he’d ended up on a cliff with a view.

Mance frowned. “There are no high cliffs on the banks of the Milkwater east of here.” He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “…Was it an incredibly _good_ view?”

“Yes, actually. It was something to behold.”

“The _Giant’s Stairs!_ ” Qhorin exclaimed incredulously, unable to help himself. “How in the bloody hells did you manage to get up there on your own? That’s twenty leagues away!”

“…I don’t know?”

 “That’s _north_ of here, you dolt,” Mance groaned, giving his prisoner a half-hearted kick in the leg. “Quiet, you.” Qhorin spluttered.

“Oh,” Jon wilted.

“So they’re twenty leagues _north_ of the Skirling Pass,” Mance grumbled. “For the Old Gods’ sake, keep it straight, boy. What else?”

“Last thing I remember, they were talking about _political maneuvers_.”

“No one understands the Others’ speech!”

“I must have been hallucinating that, yeah,” Jon conceded, looking weirdly harassed, “and then I tossed myself off the cliff to get away and fell in the river. All my clothes got wet and froze over, and then I ran.”

Mance gave Jon a very long, considering look. Qhorin tensed.

“You’ve got a recent head injury, and how I parse it, you’d gone cold-mad _long_ before. Do you realize just how unreliable your story is?”

“…It’s the truth, though!”

Mance looked at the boy askance.

“Just what were you doing, all alone north of the Pass, anyways, with what appears to be no common Free Folk sense?”

Jon looked about ready to bolt. Shit. Eggs in a basket, then.

“Traitor!” Qhorin roared completely out of nowhere, throwing himself forward and trying to get his shackles around the boy’s neck. “You’d freely give sensitive information like that to a _Wildling?_ I’ll kill you!”

“But why?” Jon wailed, betrayed, trying to protect himself with his stool.

“First the wildling bitch, and now this! What, did you fall in love with _every_ savage after you’d laid with her the once?!”

“I don’t understand!”

Qhorin made a good show of attacking, and thankfully the boy was too shocked to realize it was barely any effort on his part—not that he really could do, anyways, what with him hopping about with tied feet like a lunatic and no real weapon besides. The boy genuinely tried to smash his face in with the stool, good lad, and Qhorin retaliated with a headbutt. Jon fell over a table, knocking over a few mugs and bowls.

Mance was standing with a rather befuddled expression on his face on the other side of the tent, apparently content to watch. Qhorin picked up a lump of wood and hopped over to the table threateningly, intending to whack the boy with it.

“What, did you _hit your head_ so hard you _forgot?_ Eh? You _didn’t remember_ you were a Crow?” Qhorin waggled his eyebrows frantically.

“What are you talking abou—oh, uh. I haven’t a clue what you’re talking about! Who are you! I have no recollection of anything, ever.”

Qhorin snuck a glance at Mance, who didn’t look like he bought the charade for a second. Damn!

“I’ll kill you, if you don’t kill me first!”

With that, Jon got the fire to stand up and come at him. They tussled viciously before the table. It was pitiful, really. Hadn’t anyone taught the boy something other than the sword?

Mance was looking like he was considering _, maybe,_ breaking up the fight, just to save everyone the ignominy. Damn, again. This was taking much too long, and by the gods, let him be selfish for once. He didn’t want to die boiling alive in a stew for blasted Thenns. Qhorin had been trying to inch them closer to the hammer on the far end of the table, keeping up an endless string of hints hidden as vile insults all the while, but the lad hadn’t yet noticed it. Soon, though, there wouldn’t be a plausible reason _not_ to reach for it himself and drive it through Jon’s thick skull.

The lad just wasn’t getting the _point_ , here.

“You’re a dishonorable cunt! Your lord father _got what he deserved_ , letting you live!” Qhorin snarled for lack of anything better, real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff, and Jon punched straight through his chest with a wet _crack_.

Mance cursed.

For a second, the boy looked startled, eyes flickering a strange blue, as if he hadn’t expected his own strength, and then the look shifted to pale horror. Qhorin fell to the ground as the boy backed away.

Surprisingly, it was Mance who knelt at his side to hear his last breaths.

“Try boiling me now, you fucker _,_ ” Qhorin tried to whisper, but all he could do was gurgle.

“I never should have let myself lay eyes on you again,” Mance rasped. “You fucker.”

Qhorin Halfhand let a terrible, satisfied grin come across his face, and died—as all things do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jon: I'm really hot.  
> :B  
> /shot


	3. DO YOU WANT TO BUILD A SNOWMAN

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ygritte wants her man. She gon' get her man.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments give me life. Thank you everyone for your feedback! :D PLEASE DO CONTINUE TO CRITIQUE ME TO HELL AND BACK  
> Also, this entire thing is unbeta'd. PFF, who needs anything past a rough draft, right? right??! hahA

 

Deep in the Haunted Forest, a man was dying. It wasn’t a clean death, no—it was one of those that lasted a half-hour as bile leaked from its proper places into clean flesh. A waste. Not even the dullest beast would eat tainted meat like this, Benjen thought, much less a corpse about to be animated anew. It was an odd thought, that. His body would soon die, pick itself up, and walk away without him in it.

Just like the other dead men in his ranging party had.

There was something philosophically meaningful in that, somewhere in there, about seeing his men walk away from him in death. Seemed like something Ned would think, actually, that pensive brother of his. Benjen wondered how he was doing down south. Not having to deal with wights and White Walkers, obviously. Lucky sod. He was probably having a great time eating all sorts of exotic warm-weather things, like _mangosteen_ , whatever that was.

In any case, the capitol better not have ate Ned up like every other Stark that ever ventured there. It would be a terrible thing to watch more of his kin leave him for the embrace of death. Not that he’d survive long now himself, anyways.

Fuck.

He was staring at a rock in the distance, wasting the rest of his time on this earth, when that rock moved. It wiggled a little closer, and then it turned into a little person, brown as a nut and covered in dead leaves and grime. Apparently, this was the best his dying mind could come up with to keep him occupied.

“Do not be afraid, Benjen Stark,” it said with a voice as high and clear as mountain wind. “The Three-Eyed Raven sent me. You have been saved.”

Well, that was _nice_ , really a stroke of good luck, Benjen thought muzzily, and then the little tree-man-child-thing stabbed him in the heart with a black dagger.

_FUCK—!_

~***~

The only true currency in the world, the only one that meant anything at all, was gossip. In a small village, gossip might dictate the success of a man’s livelihood or the continued happiness of a family. In a place like King’s Landing, whispers had the power to tear down empires in one breath and create kings in another—and in Mance Rayder’s camp, it had a power much greater than either: to keep away the looming panic of White Walkers with _petty entertainment_.

This afternoon, the wheels of the rumor mill turned as they do, and word quickly reached a certain spearwife’s ears of something interesting happening at Mance’s tent. _Gods, it had been so long since anything not dull had happened,_ Ygritte thought, so she’d got up close to see what the commotion was all about. There was a little crowd gathered before the tent’s entrance—something _very_ interesting, then, Ygritte guessed, and lo and behold, it was. Just inside the tent was the little virgin Crow she’d stranded in the mountains two weeks ago, standing over the Halfhand’s corpse. By some tasteless miracle, he was still alive, and by some other unholy magic, he was still unfairly _fit_.

“What’s happened here then?” She asked a gawking raider.

“Oh, aye, apparently that green boy punched out the Halfhand’s heart. With _one_ blow.”

Well, now.

“Might as well take this,” Mance was saying, handing Jon the Halfhand’s black cloak. “I’d hate to see workmanship like that burn.”

After some hesitation, Jon took it.

“Now piss off.”

The crowd dispersed quickly, as they tended to do after seeing a one-time wonder, and Jon was left looking utterly lost amid the throng. A Thenn or two absconded with the Halfhand’s body, no doubt to eat him and absorb his power or whatever rot it was they believed. A couple of other spearwives lingered at the edge of the circle, though, and were starting to look at the man appreciatively.

Oh, no. That wouldn’t do.

Ygritte made the decision right then and there that _yes, this was **her** man now_, and strode over to snatch him up before he could protest.

“Jon Snow,” she called. The other spearwives snarled like shadowcats and she made a rude gesture at them behind her back. “I’d’ve thought you’d died in a ditch long ago, if I weren’t seein’ you with my own eyes.”

“Ygritte--? I mean. Uh. Who are you. Stranger.”

The gall! Ygritte punched him in the shoulder and he blinked at her owlishly. Huh. Had his eyes always been that shade of darkish-blue? Must’ve been.

Jon tried again. “I’ve got amnesia.”

“What’s _amnesia?”_

“When you hit your head and forget things.”

“You definitely remembered me.”

“…It’s selective.”

Ygritte wrinkled her nose. That wasn’t likely, at all. “You a Wildlin’, now?”

“I suppose I must be,” he replied, suddenly standing straight and putting on a look of stubborn determination. “As I don’t remember anything before I got lost in the Pass a fortnight back. I’m sure of _that,_ at least.”

Ygritte snorted. “You know nothing, Jon Snow.”

“That’s right. I don’t know anything. At all. I’ve a head wound.”

She supposed she’d take what she could get.

~***~

Mance Rayder had declared the camp was moving south, so every man, woman, and child was busy with packing. Thankfully, Ygritte had an extra pair of hands to help, now. Not so thankfully, that extra pair of hands was being pelted with snowballs by the nearby ruffian children and he wasn’t doing anything to deal with them. His (handsome) face was becoming increasingly long.

“Throw something at them and be done with it,” she finally said, meticulously going through her inventory for the third time.

“But they’re children,” he gasped, scandalized (like the flimsy Southerner he was), trying to wrestle the straps of his pack shut.

“Exactly. They’re children,” and she scooped up a ball of snow and flung it at the wretched urchins. They laughed and scuttled back precisely a foot. “See? Nothing to it.”

Jon looked unsure. A snowball _piffed_ against his face. Ygritte turned to throw something worse at the kids—maybe a knife or two, for messing with Her Man—but they’d already run away. Cowards.

Ygritte turned back around, and found Jon had managed to make a perfect snowball the size of his head in that short time. She wondered how he’d managed that, and more importantly how he was planning on throwing it, but he was just staring at it in his hands like it was going to eat him alive. It made him look constipated.

“I made a snowball,” he croaked.

“…yeah?”

“It…! I…!” and he dropped the thing like a hot stone and ran away. The straps of his pack burst sadly apart.

Perhaps he really _had_ gone cold-mad and forgot himself. He was lucky he was so pretty.

~***~

“Climb the Wall, Tormund,” the King-Beyond-the-Wall declared, clapping the big man on the shoulder. Around them the horses of Night’s Watch spiraled across the Fist in a macabre dance of dismembered bits. Ygritte crossed her arms and pretended she didn’t feel the chill.

“Take this one with you.” Mance jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Jon. “He’s a Crow.”

“No I’m not,” Jon said dully. “I don’t remember anythin’.”

“Yeah, he knows nothin’!” Ygritte piped up. “And he’s no Crow, anymore. He’s with me.”

“Mm-hmm. He’ll be able to tell you Castle Black’s defenses. Tickle him a bit, he’ll talk.”

“No please,” Jon mumbled, tugging Qhorin’s cloak around himself tightly. Tormund gave him a toothy, savage grin.

Orell sneezed and shook himself. “Strange how cold it is here, even at midday. The air’s still, too.”

“Must be the ghosts of the dead,” Tormund said.

“The dead aren’t here.”

“Doesn’t mean their ghosts aren’t.”

~***~

Apparently, the man she’d decided to steal was a bit _odd_.

Increasingly, Jon had taken to wearing not only the Halfhand’s cloak but a scarf wrapped around his face and a floppy hat he’d won in an arm wrestling match jammed on his head, leaving not an inch of his pretty features to see the light of day. It was a crime against nature, surely. The others laughed at him for needing so much to stay warm, but it didn’t make much sense. See, Ygritte had _noticed_ some things.

Whenever their group made camp, Jon always sat as far from the fire as possible. Whatever warm drink was being passed around, he would politely refuse. Just the night before, Ygritte had spied him _pretending_ to sip at his bowl of stew (he thought he was hiding it so well), and only when it stopped steaming and froze halfway over did he eat it. It was tiny things like these that had her puzzled. That wasn’t even counting that one time she’d caught him sneaking mouthfuls of snow under the guise of tying his shoes.

Obviously, getting lost had made him a little funny in the head.

But who cared? Not she, not when there was a much bigger problem. It had been precisely a month, three weeks, and two days since they’d met, and he hadn’t _once_ tried to lay with her. At all. Even if she was being indecently forward. Everyone noticed.

She’d seen Tormund pull him aside once and quietly give him advice on what herbs to take if he’d been having trouble getting it up.  Now that she thought about it, the trek had been particularly cold and biting after that.

It wasn’t as if he weren’t interested, either. She’d caught him glancing her way with such a pitiful, hang-dog look of longing so many times she wondered if he was even pulling himself off in the meanwhile. The whole thing was ridiculous, and she wouldn’t have it, not when there was something better they could be doing with each other. With that in mind, she put her plan into action—she stole his stupid hat and scarf, lured him into a cave with a hot spring, and made to have her way with him.

“I want you to see me, Jon Snow,” she growled throatily. Her Man was standing there stiff as a board, eyes blown black as night, breathing unevenly. He licked his lips without thought. Good. “All of me— _ah-chhh!_ ”

She sneezed. Funny, it had gotten inexplicably chilly in here. Must be the wind.

“No please,” Jon blurted, somehow deathly pale _and_ red of face at the same time, and ran away.

Ygritte cursed, tossed her furs back on, and ran after him—only to slip on an odd patch of ice where Jon was just standing. She fell flat on her face and decided a soak in the pool was well-deserved for all that effort.

~***~

Upon reflection, it was ridiculous the lengths she was willing to go to get this man.

After that debacle in the cave, Jon had taken to avoiding her like she’d caught the plague and was walking around covered in pustules. It was a victory if she could speak even three words to his face in a day—when they weren’t walking, trying to make good time to the Wall, he was burrowed in his tent at the far edge of camp, being _maudlin._

Honestly, no man should take this much effort to seduce—no man should be _worth_ that effort. She should have given up by now, if he was going to be this obtuse! Why _hadn’t_ she just given up and let him be, chase after another man?

…Of course she wasn’t going to chase another man. Stupid Jon and his pretty, pretty face and his pretty, pretty hair—she wanted him, and she would have him, and so she found herself in front of his tent, yelling at the stubborn fool.

“Jon! Come out of that tent! I never see you anymore.”

“Go away, Ygritte!”

“You want me—I can see it in your eyes! Why won’t you do something about it like a man? Do you want to build a relationship or not?”

“No, I do not. I most definitely do not. Not at all. Go away, and stay away. It’s for the best.”

The nerve! It wasn’t even convincing.

“I am _coming in there_ ,” she declared, and tried to wrench open the tent flaps—but they were frozen shut somehow. She cursed. Damn wind.

~***~

“Face it, Ygritte!” Orell beseeched as they hiked the last few miles toward the Wall. “He doesn’t want you! Why can’t you get it through your thick head?”

“I’m not thick-headed!” Ygritte cried, and punched him in the nose.

“You two deserve each other,” Orell complained, eyes watering and gingerly touching his face. “Really, you do—but it won’t _ever work out_ , because that man is _dim_.”

This time, she punched him in the eye.

~***~

A little while later, it didn’t seem to matter so much what Orell’s opinion was. Things like that weren’t so important when you were dangling off the Wall by a single line of rope, like a spider in the breeze, and the fucker himself was sawing away at it. Funny how life was, that a tiny little chisel could crack apart so much ice.

“If I survive this,” she screamed as she and Jon swung for the ledge below them, “I’ll kick you so hard you’ll never piss right again!”

This was apparently a mistake, as Orell gave the rope a final hack and it snapped. Below her, Jon scrabbled for the ledge, and missed. They fell.

_I am going to die,_ she realized, as the sky grew farther away. It didn’t seem quite real, and her heart remained calm even as she knew there were only seconds left before she was gone. Beside her, Jon was reaching for the Wall, trying in vain to find purchase, and his hand was skidding from the ice. They were already falling too fast. His gloves had been torn off. Ygritte closed her eyes, not wanting to see.

Something screeched and cracked above her. The rope around her middle suddenly went tight and her breath left her gut like the blow of a hammer. They were still falling, but the descent was slowing, and very quickly it came to a stop on narrow ledge. She sprawled across the surface and grabbed hold of what she could, and when no second body came tumbling down she looked up to see Jon hanging impossibly by his fingers, shivering violently. Above him two scars in the Wall stretched up out of sight.

“Ygritte, please—quickly!” he shouted, and in the next moment, Ygritte realized the ledge under her was nothing but newly-packed snow as it began to crumble away. In a second she’d gotten a grip on her picks again and regained a foothold, and watched as the ledge disappeared into nothing.

For a moment there was silence, and then without a word they continued on. For hours, they climbed that unending ascent into eternity, and somehow, just at the break of dawn, they pulled themselves over the final ledge and were alive. The clouds had parted, and the winds had stopped.

We are standing at the top of the world, Ygritte thought, and wondered if Jon knew the same. She turned, and Jon saw her, and they finally fell toward each other and kissed. His lips were as cold as ice, but hers probably were, too. He looked desperately _afraid_ , silly virgin boy that he was, and she laughed. Slowly, he grinned, and his blue, blue eyes lit up in wonder. The sun rose to the east behind them, and the green lands to the south were covered in gold.

_Oh_ , she thought. _I love him._

And for a moment, it was all the truth worth anything at all.

~***~

Nothing good could ever last. Young as Ygritte was, she really ought to have learned by now. There was a pale direwolf over there, chewing on a raider’s neck, a black direwolf there, being fought off by another, and her in the middle still trying to figure out how things had gone so wrong.

Jon was scrapping with Orell, with the body of the old man beside them. Several months had passed without a sword in his hand, and yet he was still formidable—but surely not enough. Ygritte struggled to help him, but Tormund was there, holding her arms still.

“He’s one of them,” Tormund shouted in her ear. “Don’t!”

Yes, he was—but she didn’t care to think about it.

In the end, Jon punched Orell in the face with his bare hand, and the skinchanger broke and fell dead to the ground. Jon glanced her way but once, hopped on a horse, and buggered off. He _left her._ Ygritte knocked Tormund’s arms away and loosed an arrow at her man half-heartedly, but it bounced off his leg somehow and fell to the dirt.

The wolves had gone back to wherever they had come from, and Ygritte and Tormund stood alone in the rain and mud.

“Cunt,” Tormund muttered.

Eventually, they turned to collect and burn the dead, for lack of anything better to do—but strangely enough, Orell’s body was nowhere to be found.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jon's the One Punch Man, now, I guess. whoops didn't mean for that to happen lolololol


	4. CONCEAL, DON'T FEEL

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Starks, angsting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So apparently, I've decided to plan out the plot a bit more, and that meant a couple weeks of writing bits of future chapters here and there instead of going linearly. Damn! Thought I'd finally cracked the secret to not planning too much with this one! Sorry for the wait. Anyways, this chapter ended up rambling on for a few thousand more words than was bearable because of it (and because I've lost all hope of being concise), so I've cut it in half. This is the first half. Second half to follow in the next few days.
> 
> Thank you everyone for your comments--they're like tasty, tasty morsels of POSITIVE, PRODUCTIVE ENERGY. :D Please keep them coming--they're what keeps *me* going!!

 

 

Being dead was dreadfully dull business. One would think that passing through the veil of death would offer some insight into the secrets of the world, like the answers to such profound questions as _what is the purpose of life on this earth, what was the meaning of my being born,_ and _who was it really that stole my favorite toy when I was five?_ But, alas, no insight was given. On the contrary, after a few months of it, the novelty of still being able to think these questions up had very much worn off, especially since Benjen’s experience of death seemed comparable to his life, except with more errand-running.

Too much errand-running. Like the errand he was running at this very moment.

“There’s something happening at Whitetree,” the Three-Eyed Raven had croaked from his perch. “Or something that _will_ happen, in a week or so, which was directly caused by the happenings from two months ago in the Lands of Always Winter—or is it eight thousand years ago, at the Nightfort? It’s gotten confusing, as of late.”

There was no refusing the old man, not when it was by his decree that Benjen still existed enough to complain about the quality of his existence, so here he was, riding upon an elk going south, keeping his milky eyes peeled for either a White Walker, a legion of wights, or a Brother of the Night’s Watch.

“One of those,” the old greenseer had muttered. “I think.”

“Why is it that I’m dead,” he griped to an audience of trees and more trees, “and I’m still being worked like a mule?”

The elk snorted beneath him.

“I should be in the ground complaining of the cold, rather than traipsing about complaining of the work hours.”

The elk huffed and continued to plod along.

“Rude,” Benjen muttered.

It wasn’t as if he resented being saved. It was certainly preferable to think and walk and talk on his own rather than drifting about in the nothing. Still, the Children could have done better. His hands had slowly turned black and claw-like over the last few months, and he suspected a maggot had wriggled under his skin some time ago and was happily making its home deep inside his left nostril. There weren’t many mirrors up beyond the Wall, but he figured his face had become the stuff of nightmares.

There wasn’t much else to use his thinking on, besides moaning to himself about that. Didn’t he used to be a quite cheerful fellow? He might have been, but with every passing day, Benjen felt himself grow grumpier and grumpier. He was practically becoming Ned.

…But Ned was dead.

Fuck.

“At least I still have you,” he muttered to the elk. The elk didn’t say anything back.

~***~

Sometimes, things just went wrong—one misfortune after another without end. Firstly, Ygritte had tried to kill him. Secondly, some unfamiliar new _recruits_ manning the gate at Castle Black had tried to kill him (having seen his attire), and _thirdly_ , after Sam and Pyp had saved his skin from that, Ser Alliser had him dragged off and locked up while the council deliberated about killing him as well. Now, here he was, curled up in his cell, trying to keep the furs from freezing over every time he exhaled. Not that it mattered—the stone walls were already covered in a thin layer of new frost and crinkling ice, because a fourth tragedy had come to pass.

He’d found out about Robb. And Bran, and Rickon. It hurt. Maester Aemon had been gentle with the news, but his insides remained bitterly cold even after having several days of being confined to think it over. He sighed heavily, and the little hairs on the pelt under his cheek were painted over with rime.

Being upset always made it worse.

The urge between his ribs nudged at him again, and again he replied _No._ It gurgled lumpily, as if disgruntled, and Jon figured he’d been alone with his misery for much too long. He did his best to crumple all that up and shove it where he kept his father’s memory too. There was no use for weakness like this, he told himself yet again.

A bit more ice cobwebbed in the corners anyways.

After a few more days of swallowing down bubbles of that stupid urge and swallowing down food that he didn’t want to eat and swallowing down cups of water that always froze before it touched his lips, there finally came a knock at the door to distract him from his spiraling, gloomy thoughts.

 “Jon?” Sam called, cautiously stepping through the doorway. Jon balled up the frozen furs and kicked them under the cot.

“Hello Sam,” he tried to say as normally as possible, and hoped his friend wouldn’t look too closely.

Sam shivered and rubbed his arms. “Would’ve thought these were the ice cells,” he laughed nervously. “It’s bloody cold, in here!”

“It’s not like they’d light a fire for a prisoner,” Jon said, hoping he didn’t sound too thankful. “Especially one about to be executed, probably.”

Sam made a discomfited noise. “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Jon.” He looked away, swallowed, and shakily said, “They’re ready for you.”

Jon wished he could tell Sam not to worry, since he figured neither the blade nor the noose could break him now. Maybe Sam could even explain why that was, being so well-read. Something sensible, for how Ygritte’s arrow struck him in the leg and left no mark at all, not even a bruise. How the wildling campfires began to gutter in his presence after they’d made it south of the Wall and his hands were whole. The way he learned how good it was to feel Ygritte’s lips against his own, and how every time after the first a little more hoarfrost was left on her skin.

But Jon couldn’t say it.

“Lead on, then,” he said instead, and felt like a coward.

~***~

If Ser Alliser scowled any more sourly than he was already, his face would pucker itself up and disappear into his skull.

“Do you realize just how incredibly unbelievable your story is?” He finally said after a long moment of incredulous silence from the entire council.

“Unfortunately, I do,” Jon admitted. “Mance Rayder said something much the same.”

The bald man on Ser Alliser’s left snorted. “Another fantastic detail! Do you honestly expect us to believe your talk of killing Quorin Halfhand on his orders, with a _chair_? Pretending _amnesia_ successfully in a camp of wildlings?” He laughed. “ _White Walkers?_ ”

Ser Alliser gave the man a poisonous glare at that last bit.

“The details are fantastic to the point of disbelief, yes,” Maester Aemon put forth. “But it’s also said that man cannot invent fictions more incredible than the truth. Besides, this young man is a terrible liar.”

Ser Alliser squinted and made a face. “S’pose that’s true,” he begrudgingly said. “But there’s still the issue of the Wildling girl. You kept on mentioning her, even if you didn’t mean to. I’m not much of a romantic, but I was a youth once, and I know those signs.” The acting Lord Commander leaned forward with grim triumph in his eyes. “Admit it. You broke your vows with her, didn’t you?”

“I never lay with her,” Jon said, trying not to sound too morose about it.

“But you _wanted_ to!” The bald one cried victoriously.

“Fine,” Ser Alliser grunted, ignoring the man. “So you haven’t broken your vows.” He muttered a curse under his breath. Jon jumped at the chance to put a word in edgewise.

“Mance Rayder has gathered an army a hundred thousand strong—well, fifty thousand, if you only count the fighting folk. It doesn’t really matter. They’re set to attack the Wall, get south and escape the dead, and they know we don’t have the men to stop them.”

“The dead, a threat?” The bald man murmured with a smile, shaking his head. Ser Alliser glanced his way venomously.

“It’ll be nigh impossible to stop them with our numbers. However we do it, too many of us will fall, and too many Wildlings. We should parlay with Mance. He kept talking about how important it was to save as many lives as possible whenever I was around to hear, so I’m certain he’ll consider it. Don’t know why he said the same thing every time we spoke, though.”

“Preposterous,” Ser Alliser growled. “Mance Rayder, offering to parley? If that man didn’t bat an eye at Qhorin fucking Halfhand getting killed in front of him, he’s well and truly lost. He’d never negotiate with a _crow_.”

“And how do we know this isn’t a ploy, and you aren’t really a doubly-turned turncloak setting a trap for us?” The bald man squinted. Maester Aemon made a face.

“The Wall hasn’t been breached in thousands of years,” Ser Alliser declared. “There will be no parlay—let them come.”

“Then they’ll break through on their own terms!” Jon cried. “They’ve got climbers, and they’ve got patience, and they’ve got giants!”

“Giants,” the bald man chortled. Ser Alliser didn’t bother even turning his head.

“And who are you, again?” Jon asked, supremely tired.

“I am Janos Slynt!” The man blustered, irritated at his lack of importance. “I was captain of the city watch in King’s Landing!”

…Oh.

Janos Slynt sneezed.

~***~

“Well, at least you’re not dead,” Sam tried with a smile.

“Suppose,” Jon grunted darkly, violently scrubbing at the wooden bench seats in the public latrines. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was only Maester Aemon who saved my neck, in the end."

Sam hummed, not liking to think of the might-have-beens. He looked around the room awkwardly. There was a stack of recently-cleaned chamber pots stacked up in a corner, looking indecently polished and shiny. He wondered how Jon had managed to do that. There was also, mysteriously, another, smaller stack of completely shattered pots beside the first. How Jon had managed _that_ was a completely different question.

_Scritch-scratch-screech,_ went the cleaning brush. _Scratch-scratch-scratch-scratch-scratch-scratch._

“He _is_ an overly-entitled sort of… obsequious lackey, though, isn’t he? Ser Janos,” Sam said, unable to bear hearing nothing but the tortuous death of the toilet seats.

“That man betrayed my father.” Jon scrubbed at the bench wrathfully enough to strip a couple splinters from the ancient fiber. Whoever sat there next would be unhappy indeed. “I don’t like him.”

“I don’t think anyone likes him, really. Would be odd if someone did.”

 Jon stood up to face him, gripping the soapy brush tightly enough for its wooden handle to squeak. “He’s a _brother_ now,” he ground out, looking a bit wild-eyed. “I don’t think I can handle it, Sam. Something terrible will happen.”

“Yes, well, you’re not alone in thinking he’s ill fortune, but don’t get too far ahead of yoursel—hang on.” Sam blinked and peered closer at his friend’s face. “Jon, were your eyes always that color?”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re this sort of. Darkish blue—purple, maybe?”

Jon made an _mbglep!_ sort of sound.

“Very striking, in any case, but I’m sure they were black before—”

“PURPLE,” Jon latched on with a desperate air. “Of course they’ve always been purple. The light’s just always been unflattering. Everyone back at Winterfell thought my mother was Ashara Dayne, anyhow, so it makes sense, _entirely_ , that I’d have purple-bluish eyes. Yes. They just… showed late. Like how wolves’ eyes change as they grow.”

“I’m certain eyes don’t work like that in people,” Sam said, unconvinced.

“I’m certain they do, because they’re mine. Now leave it alone, Sam, it’s not important.”

Sam was pretty sure it _was_ important, but before he could open his mouth again to speak that opinion a recruit walked in, obviously intending to do his business. He hesitated a bit, eyes flicking over the soapy, half-cleaned state of the latrines, and Jon threw an icy, purpley-blue glare at him.

“Are you going to _aim?_ ” He snarled.

The poor man hurriedly backed away and left.

“As I was saying,” Sam insisted, “you—”

“We haven’t had the chance to talk lately,” Jon interrupted loudly, pointedly getting back to his scrubbing. “What happened to you after the massacre at the Fist?”

Fine, then.

“We retreated back to Craster’s, but there was a mutiny. I ran away at the first sign of it with Gilly hoping to reach the Nightfort.” Sam furrowed his brow. “I came across someone very strange during my journey back to the Wall—a man all in black, riding a great elk. He must have been a brother, but I couldn’t see his face, and he never told me his name. He saved me and Gilly from a White Walker and its wights.”

Jon nearly dropped the brush down a hole. _Clackety-clink._ “A White Walker! You’re lucky you’re not dead. Or worse,” he mumbled. “Have you told anyone? Ser Alliser?”

“Of course!” Sam exclaimed, miffed. “But they never take me seriously, and they were preoccupied with trying to incriminate me and Gilly having _relations_. Which we didn’t. Come to think of it, it was Maester Aemon who vouched for me, too.”

“The Maester is a forgiving man. I suspect he sees us all as unruly grandchildren.” Jon snorted humorlessly. “Imagine that, me with so many new relatives, and everyone else in my family dead,” he gloomed, and scrubbed morosely around the rim of a seat.

_Scritch-scratch-scritch-scratch._

Sam bit his lip.

“There’s. There’s something else, actually, that I haven’t told anyone. I promised him, but… When me and Gilly got to the Nightfort, I saw your brother Bran. He’s alive, and now he’s, well.” Sam gulped. “ _Gone beyond the Wall,_ ” he said in a squeak.

_Scratch-scritcSNAPCLANK. *splish.*_

Sam sneezed.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jon is an allergen. He's a dust mote!


	5. DON'T KNOW IF I'M ELATED OR GASSY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> downtime.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took way too long to write. I'm so sorry for the slow updates! Somehow that "second half" of last chapter up and turned into its own thing, sorta. Also I realize not much Frozen stuff is going on--I'm hoping within a couple chapters to move that part of the plot along. gah. for now, just... setting stuff up. *shrugs* ENJOY IN THE MEANTIME
> 
> Thanks everyone who's still reading! I really appreciate your comments/concrit/anything and everything. :D

Between Sam’s revelation and the two-fold increase in detestably smelly chores, Jon’s mood had turned from sullen to foul and stayed foul without reprieve. It was agony. A cloud of cold seemed to follow him around, leaving a sluggy trail of frost, suspicion and paranoia wherever he went, so he’d started to shut himself in his cell whenever he didn’t have any pressing duties—but even then it wasn’t enough. Most times it was all he could do to keep from glaring at the washbasin too hard, or he’d end up with a block of ice and no way to finish Ser Janos Slynt’s dirty, poxy laundry—which he was doing when a young boy had run up to the castle, shivering to his bones, bringing news of Wildlings and fell tidings of death.

“I knew it was a portent of evil,” Olly wibbled, wiping at his face. Nearly all the brothers at Castle Black had squeezed into the main hall to listen to his words. “Me mum an’ da both told me weren’t no such thing as dead men walking, but I saw’rit! I swear! Face all busted in and shambling about in the woods beside our house. And wouldn’t you know it, barely a fortnight passes and a horde of _savages_ comes down, and. A-and.” His face crumpled. Jon patted his shoulder sympathetically with a twice-gloved hand.

“My family,” the boy mourned. Hobb, the cook, came over to the bench where he sat and shoved a bowl of stew in his hands with a grunt.

“A wight south of the Wall,” Ser Alliser muttered from the high table, perturbed. “Just the one?”

“Aye.”

The crowd in the main hall muttered amongst themselves at that. Jon pursed his lips and wondered where it might have come from. How ominous.

“Did you see how many wildlings there were?” Ser Alliser continued. “Could you describe them?”

“A band of fifteen or twenty, I think. There were a lot of men with scars on their faces—it was one of them that let me go, and said he’d… _eat_ …” Olly swallowed, pale. “And there were two others; a big man with a red beard. A red-haired woman.”

Jon perked up. “A red-haired woman?”

“Aye, a ginger _bitch_ ,” Olly said, tearing up angrily. “She killed me da.”

“…oh,” Jon said.

“I’ll never, ever forget her face,” the boy growled, face black with thunderous retribution. “Ever.”

Jon winced.

The discussion devolved soon after into a lot of angry shouting and declarations of revenge and Ser Alliser trying to rope Jon into helping him talk sense into everyone, and in the end it was a horn and Grenn and Edd limping back to Castle Black that shut everyone up.

Jon tried to rush toward the two survivors along with a few others, but was stopped at the mouth of the tunnel by a sudden bout of fiery indigestion and nausea. He clutched his belly and cursed out Hobb for his atrocious cooking. By the time he’d recovered enough to move again, Grenn and Edd had staggered their way into the courtyard and been sat down to be interrogated. Jon stumbled away from the Wall, feeling a bit better with each step, and caught Edd’s muttered jape about Craster’s wives at the edge of his hearing. The mutineers were still alive, and were now a problem.

…They ought to do something about that, oughtn’t they?

~***~

Jon was holding a grudge, Sam was sure of it. Why else would he be avoiding him? True, he’d withheld the truth about Bran and Rickon from him for a little while, but this kind of response was utterly uncalled for. Sam intended to give him a firmly-worded piece of his mind. Unfortunately, Jon was difficult to corner—especially since Ser Alliser refused his bid to raid Craster’s Keep, after which Jon had practically disappeared.

Fortunately, an opportunity finally arose when Sam scrounged up the kitchen rotation on a lark and found Jon’s name there on the afternoon shift.

“Jon, we need to talk. You’re practically nocturnal now, and none of us have seen you in days. What have you been doing?”

Jon mumbled something about _duties_ and being _mature_ , said “this is a bad time to talk, Sam,” and following that went back to very gingerly peeling potatoes. His gloves were off, for once, having been stabbed into another table by what looked like one of Hobb’s knives.

“How is this a bad time?”

“I’m very busy,” Jon hedged, and tossed a peeled potato in a bucket. It clunked solidly against the other half-frozen potatoes there.

Sam made an incredulous face. “How does this take any effort at all?”

“It takes more concentration than you know,” Jon said ominously, and picked up another potato as if it were fragile glass. There were dark circles under his eyes.

Sam’s face fell. “It’s what I said, isn’t it? About your brothers. I’m sorry for that, but to go to these lengths—.”

“No, Sam, it’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“It’s nothing.”

Absolutely ridiculous. “Well,” he sighed exasperatedly, “you can’t just keep being a ghost, forever. Everyone’s asking where you’ve been. And if you’re not moved by that,” and Sam dearly hoped his friend cared enough to be moved, “then think about the wildling army. Think about the dead! None of us are prepared for them. Are you just going to sit here doing nothing, then?”

Jon tossed the potato into the bucket with a solid _clang_ and shoved his hands under his armpits, bristling like a highly affronted cat.

“Leave me alone.”

“No.”

“It’s for the best.”

“ _No_.”

“…I’ll do something productive later. Go away, please.”

“Fine,” Sam huffed.

~***~

“What do you think, Pyp,” Sam muttered, stopping at the railing to watch Jon and Grenn train a batch of brothers. He readjusted the stack of books in his arms. Pyp hummed next to him.

“Most Wildlings like to fight with a weapon in each hand,” Jon was saying, trying to look as if he knew what he was doing with his left hand. There were stars in Olly’s eyes.

“At least he’s socializing,” Pyp shrugged. “Haven’t seen much of him, of late.”

Now Jon had given up and passed the extra sword to Grenn, and they were sparring. Sam privately thought Jon’s swordsmanship had deteriorated somewhat since he saw him last—or maybe it was just that he was dressed in six or seven layers and looked a bit like he couldn’t quite move himself because of it.

“Have you seen him wear anything less than full winter attire since he returned?” Sam gossiped. Pyp shrugged.

“S’pose not, but I don’t particularly care.”

“He’s a _swordsman_ , Pyp—with a highborn’s training! Usually he’s pretentiously meticulous about the way he practices. Doesn’t _this_ ,” he halfway gestured at the scene below, “strike you as out-of-character for him?”

Pyp quirked a brow at his fellow steward. “He’s also a Northman, unlike us, and probably has better instincts about the cold seasons than we do. It’s probably bred into him to preemptively put on extra layers. You know, like how cats and dogs can sense storms coming a day ahead.”

“Grenn’s Northern,” Sam argued. “You don’t see him doing this sort of thing.”

“ _Grenn_ is also a bit _stupid_.”

Below, Jon gave Grenn’s right-hand practice sword a heavy, disarming whack, and with a mournful squeal, the blade cracked in half. The courtyard fell into a gawking silence. Grenn held the pommel up and inspected the break, looking particularly baffled.

“There must have been a weakness in the blade already,” Jon said loudly, sounding a bit too panicked for the situation. Sam and Pyp exchanged a wide-eyed look. Olly sneezed down below.

A recruit—the same one from before, actually, in the latrines—piped up, “The steel here’s not very good quality. That makes sense.”

“ _Thank_ you, Locke,” Jon said. “You’re so sensible.”

“I am, aren’t I?” the recruit shrugged.

Ser Alliser then made an appearance and started to lay into Jon as usual for threatening his authority, with Janos Slynt tagging along beside, and the fighters dispersed.

“Come off it, Sam. You’re probably just worrying too much about nothing.” Pyp gave him a nudge in the shoulder, and walked away to finish his own chores. Sam frowned to himself.

“Your self-deprecating jokes make me peg you as an honorable sort of fellow,” Jon was saying below. “You’re not half-bad.”

“That’s very good to hear,” Locke said with a true smile.

~***~

“‘ _Makes sense’_ ,” Sam muttered to himself, quill scratching out the words of yet another letter to be sent to some-place-or-other. “How the bloody hells does that make sense? No man can break steel like that.”

Sam didn’t know whether to be glad the other brothers in black were too dull to catch on, or despair. Who would actually believe that excuse could work? Nobody but Jon, who’d come back from his escapade up North afflicted with a terrible case of shiftiness. Now that he thought about it, there was an inordinate amount of _oddities_ about his friend he’d been ignoring.

“Maester Aemon,” Sam asked, unable to help himself. “What do you know of eyes changing color?”

The old man at the other table raised his brows. “Changing color? Ho—that’s not very common. I suppose the eyes of dogs and wolves do, when they’re pups almost grown.”

“It’s a specific person I’m wondering about, to be honest,” Sam professed. “Jon Snow. His eyes have gone from black to blue. Or purple, as he claims. He says it’s from his mother’s blood.”

“Never have I heard of a man’s eyes changing color,” Maester Aemon mused. “Even if it were possible, that particular shade tends not to present when the other parent is dark-eyed. I should know. Then again, my knowledge of the subject is eighty years out of date, and the times are strange.”

The old maester went on to list every Targaryen he knew with even slightly deviating eye color (of which there were quite a few), and Sam very quickly found himself thinking why he’d asked in the first place.

“—and of course, great-granduncle Brynden had red eyes, but that was a matter of him being so damned pale—

“Thank you, Maester Aemon,” Sam finally cut in, “but I’m fairly sure Jon’s not of Valyrian issue, and his questionable eye color is more a problem of bodily injury… or possibly witchcraft.”

The old man humphed. “Young people and their refusal to believe common sense. Have you finished with those letters, yet, Tarly?”

And so, Sam found himself huffing and puffing up the stairs to the rookery, bemoaning the fact his desperate flight across the wilderness with Gilly beyond the Wall had done nothing to improve his respiratory health. As he neared the top of the tower, idly wondering how next to corner Jon and have a serious chat, there was a burst of angry squawking from the open door and he peeked in cautiously.

“You’re saying something,” Jon was fervently whispering to one of the birds, looking a bit crazed. His not-really-purple eyes were bloodshot. “I _know_ you’re saying something to me. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Caw,” it said. “Cwarr.”

“What do you _mean_ ,” Jon agonized.

“ _C-warrr, kkkg_ ,” it croaked, very deliberately. “ _Caw-warrr-gg!”_ It slapped its beak on its perch in frustration.

“That makes even _less_ sense!” Jon whisper-shouted, struggling not to bang his fist on the writing desk. “Why are the dreams telling me to come to you when you don’t even talk?”

“ _C-hwarrr! WARRRRRR-G-G!_ ” the raven shrieked.

“ _GAHH,_ ” Jon shouted back. “ _ARGH!_ ”

Sam decided Maester Aemon’s messages could wait.

~***~

“I think there’s something wrong with Jon,” Sam said bluntly, putting his bowl of stew down and sitting himself on the bench. Grenn, Pyp, and Edd were at the main hall, gnawing on heels of the usual leathery bread.

“How so?” Edd said through his mouthful.

“Well, firstly. He’s been… distant, since he returned. I’m sure you’ve all noticed it. He’s been spending a lot of time in his quarters, moping.”

“He has good reason to mope,” Grenn said, chewing a piece of dry chicken.

“And he’s always been a bit mopey,” Pyp said, poking at his flavorless stew.

“Yes, he does have a penchant for that,” Sam admitted. “But this is more than just a melancholy disposition! He hasn’t even been sitting with us during mealtimes. I don’t think he’s been eating.”

“If that’s the case,” Edd said, “then he’s been dead for weeks, and it’s his corpse doing the laundry and mucking out the stables. I always said they’d find a way to put the dead to work one day.”

“He’s hiding something from us,” Sam went on, “probably out of some misplaced sense of nobility or other nonsense. Something troubling him—I think he’s ill.” He leaned forwards, and whispered desperately, “I think he’s got _brain damage._ ”

The three looked at him incredulously.

“It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation! There’s men who’ve taken blows to the head and forgotten pain, and been able to manage feats of impossible strength because of it. A change in eye color might be explained by a bleeding in the skull!”

“And where did you hear that?” Edd asked.

“I read it in a—”

“Never mind.”

“It’s kind of a stretch,” Grenn said dubiously. “If he _were_ addled in the head, wouldn’t he talk like a simpleton?”

“Like you?” Pyp japed.

“It’s enough that he’s been talking to animals, expecting good conversation!” Sam despaired. “I’ve already met one madman who talks to ravens. I don’t want to watch Jon become another!”

“Who’ve you met that talks to ravens?” Pyp asked curiously, fending off Grenn’s strangling hands.

“Well, there was this odd man—”

“Oi, oi, shut it—” Grenn suddenly said, pointing at the door. “Look at that, there he is!” Their local oddity had shuffled into the hall with that amiable new recruit, Locke, stopping in front of Ser Alliser to exchange a few muttered words.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” Pyp gossiped.

“Probably how we’re all going to die in a week or so,” Edd said dourly. “It’s always that.”

~***~

Ser Alliser had decided that a foray to Craster’s Keep was a good idea after all, much to Jon’s surprise, and so it was that one rousing, inspirational speech later, he found himself preparing for a ranging out Beyond the Wall with a party of ten loyal men.

“How do you always give such good speeches?” Grenn asked, adjusting the straps of his horse’s saddle.

“I suppose it’s a talent. I’d always got good marks in historical art literature. It was practically the only thing I could ever claim to be truly better at than my brother Robb.”

He made a face as soon as he said it. Damn it all, now he’d gone and made himself sad. He surreptitiously stomped his feet to break the ice that had formed under his boots. Grenn gave him a sympathetic look and turned back to his horse, taking the reins and clicking his tongue. The horse whickered.

“Form up,” Jon called, and the party began to make their way through the tunnel. He tugged at his horse’s reins, and the great beast gave him a nasty, suspicious glare before very slowly stepping forward. He could swear it growled at him.

What a bother.

…Even more of a bother, however, was the lance of debilitating nausea and pain that struck him as soon as he took one step beneath the Wall. He gasped and let go of the reins, stumbling back outside. The horse neighed triumphantly and cantered on without him.

Jon blinked. He felt better. What a strange, sudden bout of illness—must have eaten something rancid to break his fast that morning. Typical.

One step later, he was again beset by torturous pain everywhere, and it slowly dawned on him this might not just be Hobb’s culinary ineptitude. He gagged.

“Jon?” Grenn said, having hung back. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Just, just a…” Jon rasped through his splitting headache, grasping for any excuse at all, “dysentery.”

Grenn looked at him funnily. “Jon, if you had dysentery, you’d be dead,” and suddenly an expression of understanding dawned on his face. “It’s the nerves, isn’t it? First time going out to kill someone—I get it.” Grenn clapped him on the shoulder. “Felt the same way, once before. Come on, brother,” and steered him into the tunnel. “We are the Watchers on the Wall—”

Jon panicked. “No, no, wait—”

But there was no pain.

“—and we’ll get the fuckers, don’t worry,” and with a final pat, Grenn let his hand fall from Jon’s shoulder. Immediately, Jon was stabbed by another jolt of nausea and disorientation, worse than before. Jon wheezed, whipped his hand out, and clutched at Grenn’s arm like a lifeline. The pain went away.

“…Jon?”

“I’m holding your arm,” Jon said very seriously.

“…yeah?”

“I’m not letting go.” He gripped Grenn’s arm a bit harder, fingers like claws. Grenn winced.

“…Why?”

“You’re absolutely right. I am deathly nervous,” Jon declared, “and you make me feel better.”

Grenn’s face ran the gamut of confusion, to suspicion, and then to dismay and resignation.

“Erm,” he said. “S’pose that’s alright, then.”

So Jon kept up his deathgrip on Grenn’s arm as they walked through the tunnel to the other side.

“Sam’s ridiculous. Sam doesn’t know anything,” Grenn was muttering to himself, having some sort of crisis. “Maybe he’s right.”

The Wall seemed to silently moan, the icy air heavy with thwarted purpose between them. Jon tried very, very hard not to think about it.

~***~

Sixty miles from the Wall, behind some scraggly bushes and short trees, Jon’s raiding party listened in confusion to Locke’s report.

“There’s no one there,” Locke said, looking genuinely bemused after having come back from his reconnoitering. “Just the womenfolk. The mutineers are gone—killed, looks like. There was a great pit of ashes outside the keep.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound right,” Jon said.

“My feet have got sores on top of the old sores for nothing, then,” Edd commented dourly. “ _That_ sounds about right, if nothing else.”

“Good work, Locke,” Jon said, clapping the man very carefully on the back. “You’re a dependable man.”

“I am, aren’t I,” Locke said modestly, and the group began to make their way to the keep.

Upon entering the grounds, Jon spied something horrible. There was Ghost, right in the middle of everything, lolling about in the dirt like a pup and being given pats and belly-rubs by the younger women. One of the girls fed him a scrap of dried meat and the great beast gave her a smug, wolfy grin.

Jon had never felt so betrayed in his life.

“Ghost, you _dog!_ ” he cried, marching up to his familiar. “This is where you’ve been? I’ve been alone for months, running away from White Walkers and Wildlings alike and suffering from constant anxiety, and you’re enjoying yourself even better than I’d previously expected! How could you!”

“Jon, he’s a wolf,” Grenn called after him worriedly. “He can’t understand you.”

Ghost visibly rolled his eyes, absolutely proving Grenn wrong. Then he headbutted Jon in the chest and sat on him.

“You’ve grown,” Jon wheezed.

An older woman came up to him, squinting. “This one was being kept in a cage after those brothers of yours killed the Old Bear.”

“Who let him loose?” Jon asked, trying to shove the wolf off him to no avail. Ghost peered at him curiously.

“A stranger. He came alone into the keep upon a great elk and killed half the men here. The wolf killed the other half. After he burned the bodies, he left straight away. Never said his name, but he was all in black, just as you lot are.”

“Maybe a survivor from the Fist?” Grenn guessed.

“Where’d he get a bloody elk to ride,” Edd said flatly.

Jon frowned from his spot on the ground. “Sam’s met this man before. Are you sure you don’t know anything else about this character?”

The woman shrugged. “Heard his voice. Was shouting _‘you fucking shitstains’_ the entire time. He sounded a bit like you, but that’s about it.”

The party muttered to themselves in grim worry, deliberating what next to do, and it was then that Ghost decided to lick Jon’s face.

It got stuck.

…Not much else got done that day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> is this just turning into jon-whump  
> is this what it is  
> slapstick is harder than i thought


	6. REINDEERS ARE BETTER THAN PEOPLE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> benjen is cool fight me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while! I've been distracted with the new season of GoT, as I bet everyone else is. Really takes away from mulling over old seasons, lol. This one's a long chapter, since I can't stop being wordy hAHA
> 
> Thanks everyone for reading this and leaving kudos and comments and concrit and everything else! I really appreciate it. Adds diesel to the writing machine. :D

 

One of those, that old, decrepit crone had said. _One_.

Five miles from the village of Whitetree, a scream had burst from deep in the evening woods and jolted Benjen from his lethargy into sudden wakefulness, and with a curse and a kick to the elk’s ribs, the pair went thundering in the direction of peril.

“Why can’t these instructions ever be clearer,” Benjen groused as they neared the source of distress. The elk grumbled unsympathetically.

A fat boy brandishing a sword (badly) and a wildling girl holding a baby were cowering next to a dilapidated shack in a tiny clearing. Surrounding them were a half-dozen wights and a truly ugly skinny little white walker, who was doing some kind of incomprehensible dance routine at them.

“[SHRIEK CLANK CLIKCLAKCLUNK CRAAAAA],” it said, looking mightily frustrated and gesturing wildly between the fat boy, the baby, and the moldy-looking white satchel in its grip. The corpses seemed to rattle in agreement, and it was then that Benjen burst into the glade.

“Fuck off!” He roared, and whacked three wights over with his flaming thurible-war-sickle, steed bowling through the abominations in a straight path toward the Other. With his free hand he wrenched a dragonglass dagger from its sheath at his waist and made to throw it at the accursed creature.

“[EEEP],” The twiggy White Walker screeched, and bolted away into the trees with uncanny speed. The satchel flew from its grip in its haste and landed upside-down in the snow with a _ploof_. Benjen cursed, and his dagger instead found a target in the skull of a wight. The rest made for quick work, and soon the little clearing was suffused with the smell of clammy, rotted flesh and wet boots, roasting.

_…One_ of those, the tripe.

“Who are you?” the fat boy asked shakily, helping the wildling girl up to her feet and checking her for injury.

“A friend,” he replied with utmost vagueness, and dismounted from his elk. It snorted in tired annoyance and he patted it in half-hearted apology.

“Thank you, sir,” the girl said humbly, clutching her crying baby closer to her chest. “We would’ve died, if it weren’t for you.”

“You shouldn’t thank me,” Benjen muttered gruffly, scanning the trees. “Better to thank the next raven you come across.”

“Eh?” The fat boy said.

“That’s all of them, aye?” Benjen asked, one hand on his sword, ready to draw. “No more lurking about?”

“Oh, yes,” the boy stuttered, “I mean, that’s all we noticed. Isn’t that right, Gilly?”

“I think so,” she said, rocking the babe fretfully.

“I’m Samwell Tarly, by the way. And this is, well, Gilly. As you knew already.”

Benjen grunted and stalked over to the wight he’d thrown his dagger at, yanked the weapon out, and set the thing alight. The burning corpses were unfortunately strewn about the little clearing willy-nilly, and Benjen couldn’t be bothered to risk his own un-life to pile them up neatly.

“It’s funny you should mention ravens,” Samwell Tarly went on. “Before the… the wights and the white walker appeared, near a hundred crows came and perched on that tree right there, cawing at us. It was eerie.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Benjen said. “They’re the canniest creatures I’ve ever the misfortune to meet.”

He crouched down and cautiously inspected the bag the creature had left behind. It was sewn from ice spider hide with spindly white thread—were they White Walker hairs, or were they spiders’ silk? Much like the Other itself, the make of it was incomprehensible. Benjen opened the satchel carefully. There were delicate sheaves of vellum inside, full of equally incomprehensible writing—official documents of some sort. Fragile swirls of frost clung to the pages in uniform designs along the top margins, where the faint delineations of an arcane seal were pressed. Something about those alien markings made his eyes slip and slide away from following their shapes too closely.

He tossed them in a fire. They were probably of a nefarious nature, anyway.

“You’re a Brother of the Night’s Watch, aren’t you?” Samwell said.

“Perhaps I was,” Benjen said, standing straight and double-checking that his scarf was secure. He marched back over to the elk—his job was done here, it seemed. Best to ride back north.

“Would you tell us if we’re heading in the right direction?” Samwell called. “We’re trying to get to the Wall.”

“The Wall?” Benjen furrowed his brow. “Not Whitetree?”

“…We thought _this_ was Whitetree,” Samwell mumbled. Gilly sort of glared at him exasperatedly.

Benjen squinted. “You can’t possibly be a ranger, even a new one.” He frowned darkly. “What are you doing alone with a Wildling girl, anyway? Are you a _deserter?_ ”

“I’m a steward,” Samwell protested. “And I’m no deserter.”

“What’s a _steward_ doing out beyond the Wall?” Benjen exclaimed.

“Lord Commander Mormont led a great ranging out from Castle Black a few months ago—we were attacked by the dead and retreated to Craster’s Keep, but there was a mutiny. Me and Gilly escaped.”

Benjen startled. “A mutiny? What happened? The Lord Commander—is he alright?”

“I didn’t see clearly, and by the time the fighting had got heated, we’d gone, but. I saw Lord Mormont. He was stabbed in the back—I don’t know if he survived, or if the mutineers were put down. Wait—where are you going?”

Benjen grumbled forebodingly something about riding up to the Keep to see for himself, one foot on the elk’s stirrups, but then a raven landed on his shoulder and croaked, “Craw, caw. Caw-caw, ragggh,” which he took to mean “ _Oh, I forgot to mention. There’s something I need you to pick up for me at the Nightfort. Or someone. One of those. Best do that as soon as you can.”_

And it flew off. Benjen idly wondered whether ravens made for good eating or not, and then remembered his stomach had already rotted into mulch anyways.

“You fucker,” he settled for instead, removing his foot from the stirrup and throwing a snowball apathetically at the sky, “You can’t tell me what to do.” Except the old man could, really.

“…Were you speaking to… _?_ ” Sam asked hesistantly. Gilly was muttering an old hedge-witches’ spell to ward off evil under her breath.

“Yes, because they’re exceedingly annoying. Slave-drivers, the lot of them. It looks like I’ll be heading toward the Wall myself—might as well come along, you two.”

The baby cried.

“…Three.”

~***~

It turned out the _something_ was one of his nephews, surprisingly not dead. Seemed like a habit in this family, to be surprisingly not dead—Bran, Rickon. Himself.

Not Ned, though. He was pretty dead. So was Brandon. And Lyanna. And his father. And his mother.

…Perhaps it wasn’t a habit after all.

“Samwell Tarly called you Cold Hands,” Bran piped up from his sled, obviously starved for new conversation. No wonder, since the Reed children were weird, secretive folk. One of them kept staring into nothing and the other looked like she could poke a man’s eye out with only her gaze, sharp as it was. “Who are you, really?”

Well, he wasn’t about to tell Bran that, was he? There was no use for it—not if, in the end, the knowledge would only make things difficult when they parted ways once more.

“A friend,” he said again, lowering his voice to a rasp. He flicked the elk’s reins and put himself another pace forward of the group.

“That’s no answer at all,” his beleaguered nephew pouted. The direwolf barked at his master’s side, eyeing Benjen with careful scrutiny. “Well then, why is it you smell so funny?”

“I smell fine,” Benjen lied.

“Summer thinks you smell like deer sweat and putrefaction,” Bran said smugly, catching on too quick. Benjen told himself that children were all terrible little shits, and he shouldn’t take any of this to heart (even if it _was_ true). A small cloud of crows circled overhead in the cool morning sky, cawing raucously. No help, any of them.

“He doesn’t like it,” Bran continued stoutly. “He thinks you’re _evil-_ smelling.”

How old was his dear, beloved nephew again? Ten? Twelve? Fourteen? It was hard to keep track of—Ned had so many blasted kids, a whole flock of them. Four was reasonable, but six was ridiculous. Shouldn’t the boy have grown out of this rotten phase of thoughtless, hurtful adolescent commentary by now?

“ _I_ think,” Bran said very intently and deliberately, “that no one can smell _evil,_ because evil could probably smell very nice if it wanted to, but all the same you smell _foul_. Isn’t that right, Hodor?”

“Hodor,” Hodor _Hodor_ -ed, pulling the sled along with not a care in the world.

“ _Caw!_ ” agreed the gang of crows. The Reed children nodded their heads in synchrony.

Really. This was getting out of hand. Benjen pointedly ignored them all.

“I’ll continue to call you smelly until you tell us who you are,” Bran declared imperiously.

“No,” Benjen gritted out.

“You smell.”

“I do not.”

“You’re stinky.”

“That’s hurtful.”

“Summer believes you’ve eaten rotted chicken recently, and it’s coming out your pores in little bits, and that’s why you smell putrid.”

“Oh, for the Old Gods’ sake,” Benjen groaned, forgetting to put on a funny rasp. His head was abuzz with agonizing annoyance. “He’s a direwolf. Of course he does. Wolves don’t know anything of biology.”

“Hang on a moment,” Bran said suspiciously.

He squinted his eyes.

He scrunched his nose.

“…Uncle Benjen?”

Damn it all.

“Fine,” Benjen grumbled, aggrieved, and gave in to the inevitable. “You’ve caught on. Yes, it’s me.”

“Uncle! You’re alive! But why are you covering your face?”

“Because I’m _not_ alive, Bran,” Benjen sighed, infinitely tired. “I’m very dead, and because of that, I look horrible. You’d scream.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” Bran said boldly.

Benjen unwrapped a bit of his scarf and looked at him. Hodor screamed.

“It’s not too bad,” Bran said shakily. “Honest.”

Benjen grunted and wrapped his face up again. The Reed children looked absolutely unmoved, which was unnatural in the highest. It must be all that bog water they drink, Benjen thought.

“So now you know. Will you stop now, with all that childish heckling? What would your mother think, eh? Or your elder brothers?” He chided.

Bran’s face fell. “Robb’s gone,” he whispered forlornly. “I think that means Mother is, too.”

Benjen hopped off the elk and violently punched a tree.

~***~

Fifty miles and several days further on, Benjen called for an early end to the day’s trek and the little group made camp in the trees near the edge of a small lake. The sky was luckily halfway clear that afternoon, and the sun provided the slight memory of warmth to cut through the chill air. They were still some distance south of Craster’s Keep; not close enough to be noticed, but not so far that a man couldn’t ride to the homestead within an hour.

Samwell Tarly’s words hung grimly in his mind.

“I’m going to hunt,” he announced as soon as camp was made. Perhaps the quiet of the Haunted Forest would settle him enough think up a plan. Something quick. As much as he wished it weren’t so, discovering the fate of the Night’s Watch wasn’t worth a full day’s dedicated reconnaissance.

“Meera can hunt,” Bran piped up from his spot against a tree. “She’s good at it.”

“Thank you,” Meera said, whittling a pile of sticks into arrows.  

Benjen grunted and dumped the sickle-chain next to the elk—it wouldn’t do to have it jingle-jangling about while he was trying to be quiet. The stupid beast was trying to graze on the bark of a tree from where it sat, like a fat goose in a garden. A crow perched in its antlers, amusing itself clicking its beak. Summer had circled away into the Forest’s depths a while ago.

“We’re not useless, you know,” his nephew accused sadly.

“I don’t think you’re useless,” Benjen sighed, going through his pack for a shortbow. “It’s only that I’ve been charged with being your guide and I take it seriously. It’s my job.”

Bran looked away. “And so you’re always busy.”

“I have my burdens,” Benjen muttered, “same as you.”

Jojen Reed looked at him too-knowingly with his strangely staring eyes. That there was a greenseer if he ever saw one—aggravating, all of them. He strapped on a quiver of arrows.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said distractedly. The crow warbled and flapped over to stand on his head, and he walked away into the wood.

“Is it something I’ve done?” Bran mumbled behind him.

“Your uncle’s just bad at being alive, is all,” Jojen said.

The problem was, Benjen thought much later, a brace of rabbits slung over his shoulder, was that he’d no clue what the situation was at the Keep. How many mutineers were there? What of Craster’s wives? Which buildings did they occupy? It might have been a few years, but he knew those grounds well enough to go about unseen if he went to spy.

 “ _Kehh_ ,” the crow blipped happily, playing with a tuft of rabbit fur.

“I don’t need your opinion,” Benjen muttered. “You don’t even have words today. You’re lucky I’m done hunting.”

“ _Cwrrr,_ ” it growled, and tried to peck the fluff into his hair.

Were there any traitors at all? Perhaps they had been ousted, and Tarly was wrong in his guess, and there was no need for action nor sorrow after all. Yes, perhaps it was so. Perhaps it was better not to know.

“ _Cwarr,_ ” the crow said again. “ _Caw.”_

“What is it now?”

“ _Caw!_ ” it cried, becoming agitated, and flew away like a dart toward camp.

“Shit,” Benjen muttered, and silently followed.

Two men in black cloaks were there in the little clearing. The elk had bolted. Meera was on the ground, and there was a swordpoint at his nephew’s throat.

“Wot do we ‘ave ‘ere?” that one was grinning. “Little lordlings, north of the Wall.”

“Lookit ‘em,” jeered the other, keeping Hodor and Jojen away. “Bet those fancy furs would fetch a pretty penny once we get down south, eh?”

The first one laughed and patted Bran’s cheek mockingly. Bran swallowed. “Don’t be daft. This one’s head’ll command a better price than any other thing here.”

“ _Get away from them_ ,” Benjen snarled, his blade unsheathed.

“What—” the idiot threatening his blood whirled around. “Where’d you—? Who—?”

With a black sneer, Benjen pulled the cloth from his face.

“Oh gods,” the other imbecile blurted out, paling rapidly. “Is that—?”

“First Ranger Stark—!” The first one yelped, sword fumbling in his shivering fingers. “But you’re dead! You’re s’posed to be dead!”

“Aye,” Benjen growled, and when they turned to flee, he ran them down with all the vengeance of an executioner denied his right, and made them know justice. One, he killed at once. The other, before he bled away, Benjen asked for news.

“Mormont’s dead,” the man shivered and cringed. “T’were eleven of us. Us two, we left—please! I’ll tell you everythin’. Spare—”

And then he died, all the same. Benjen pulled his blade from the frozen ground and wiped it clean.

“Uncle?” Bran said, eyes wide. “What’s going on?”

“Call Summer back,” he said. “My elk as well.”

When it became clear Benjen would say no more, Bran bit his lip and his eyes went white. Jojen rushed to his sister and tried to shake her awake. Hodor rocked himself, muttering.

Benjen went to collect the rabbits he’d dropped.

Eventually, the elk returned, shepherded along by its panting guardian, and Benjen prepared his weapons.

“Stay here,” he told the children, and mounted the steed with grave purpose. He flicked the reins—the elk whistled its haunting cry. “And watch the horizon. I’ll return as the sun dies.”

~***~

The treacherous filth must surely have heard his charging hooves as soon as he’d come within a half-mile of the keep, so hard was he riding through the Forest. Beside him was not-so-little Ghost, no longer a pup, weaving silently about the trees like an immaculate storm—the direwolf had been caged like a lowly dog when Benjen had found him, which served only to fuel his ire.

All around him was the sound of snow and mud and pine needles, too quiet and too calm for the truth of things. There was no blood rushing in his ears, no pounding in his heart, no haze over his vision—no breath in his throat. Benjen might have laughed at the absurdity of it all had he still the humor, but that had gone away with everything else.

There were yells in the distance now, the Keep a hundred feet away. A scrum of men was forming there. Ghost sprinted ahead, blurring over the brush, and tore out the throat of the only one sober enough to pick up a bow. The scream was cut short. Before the traitors could comprehend it, the elk hurdled the gate, crushed another man under its hooves, and there was chaos.

It was good fortune, Benjen thought with satisfaction, that they were wholly unprepared, bladework sloppy from half-drunken stupor. He spun the chain-and-sickle over his head and flung it into the chest of another man, dragging the body along the ground and into the path of another before letting go of the grip. Living men did not burn so easily as undead corpses, and the effort was wasted on men such as these.

Benjen swung one leg around, dismounting hard as the elk careened on back into the forest behind him, and drew his slender sword from his hip. Two of the filth charged at him, emboldened by drink and battle-fever, and Benjen met their blows with equal fury.

They tired quickly, hindered as they were. One ran. No matter—the wolf would take him soon enough. The remaining man lasted another few clashes before his courage failed him and he faltered, side wide open for a killing blow—but then someone yelled, and Benjen felt a dull pressure in his lower back where his kidneys were.

An inch of steel poked out from his front, but it meant nothing.

Benjen ignored the wound and struck the man before him down with a heavy two-handed sweep before the moment closed. Whoever it was behind him yelped at the movement and Benjen whipped around, blade jostling loosely in his torso; it was the man that he’d knocked over earlier, pale with terror. His empty hands shook.

The sword slipped out and fell to the ground pathetically, black with sticky cruor.

“Wraith,” the man accused hoarsely. Benjen dispatched him without ceremony.

“Shittin’ hells—!”

There, emerging blearily from Craster’s Hall, was Karl _fucking_ Tanner, clutching one of his famous knives in his right hand and a gristly, still-wet skull drowned with wine in his left.

“You _stain_ upon our name,” Benjen breathed, shaking. His voice rattled like knucklebones in a pocket.

“What the fuck are you?” The rat demanded, and Benjen hurled a dagger into its eye.

“You _fucking_ shitstains!” he bellowed, incandescently furious, and whirled around to find another enemy, something to cut down, something to cleave in two—but there were no more. On the other side of the grounds the last man there let out a death rattle, Ghost’s teeth in his neck, and that was that.

That was all of it.

Benjen stood there, unable to move and unable to stay still, brimming over with purpose that could go nowhere. There were no more shouts, no more voices on the grounds—what little noise there was, was muffled and small. Benjen closed his eyes and finally put away his sword, feeling all full of wool.

That was it.

He stepped toward the hall to where Tanner’s body lay, stooped down, and picked up the half-skull the turncloak had dropped. It had landed in a little puddle. He gently brushed away the bit of mud stuck to its cheekbone.

In the distance from within the woods there was a final high-pitched scream, abruptly cut off, but he paid it no mind.

Karl Tanner had always been a nasty little piece of work. He’d have made a great ranger if only he weren’t such a defiant shit, and maybe if he hadn’t been born Karl Tanner. All the same, there was only one man he’d want to desecrate like this. Benjen turned the skull over and over in his hands, and wondered, if he _had_ gone south all those years ago like he’d so desperately wanted, he would feel just as empty and useless as he did now.

A sluggish drop of grume splatted on the ground from his waist. Oh. He was leaking. What a bother. He’d have to stuff some leaves in it and sew himself back together, later. Served him right, not paying attention to his back. Rookie mistake, that was.

There was a splotch of red wine still staining the bottom of the skull. Benjen wiped at it vacantly with the edge of his cloak.

A woman staggered cautiously out from the hall, clutching her rags shut across her chest. She met Benjen’s eyes, and they observed each other in silence for a long moment. Benjen put the skull in a pocket and turned away.

There were eight corpses accounted for in the Keep. Four were his; one had been crushed; the rest had been mauled. Ghost was sniffing curiously around the body of a man he’d brought down, nipping at the exposed flesh of his face and neck.

“People aren’t good to eat, pup,” Benjen murmured, gently kicking Ghost away from the man’s corpse. “We put too much evil inside us. I’d bet we taste awful.”

The wolf looked up at him and cocked his head, but left the body alone. Benjen took the ankles and started to drag it away.

Someone had to do it.

“Will you come with us?” he asked the white wolf, after it was done, and there was a pyre burning. The elk had trotted back into the Keep after all the buildings had been checked, one of its antlers stained red, singing a dirge in greeting. The women were starting to mill about, unsure what to do with both their liberation and liberator. That was fine with him.

“ _I’ve got my own agenda, thank you,_ ” Ghost’s face clearly said. It licked its bloody chops, and Benjen decided bringing an extra direwolf along really wasn’t worth the effort anyways. He patted his elk’s flank, and left without another word.

~***~

The children and Hodor were asleep, piled up in a huddle to stave off the cold. They had made camp under the protection of a weirwood tree that evening, and a banked fire glowed dimly against the field of night. Summer had slinked away to hunt.

Benjen sat there in the silence, leaning against the elk’s side, quietly honing his blade. The ruby at the crossguard glinted faintly. In the morning, they would begin the last leg of their journey back to the Cave, and Benjen could finally catch a break.

He idly wondered if the sword had ever owned a name. Whatever it had been, it was lost to time, now, but surely it had been a grand one. Or maybe not. A great sword wouldn’t have found its way through the centuries just to fall into Benjen’s clammy old claws. He sighed and put it down in his lap, turning his head to look at the children. Didn’t the big man have a true name, before? Benjen was sure of it, but he’d forgotten what it was.

“Names are powerful things, don’t you think?” He quietly said to the elk. It huffed in its sleep and twitched an ear. “I haven’t given you one, yet, for all the time we’ve traveled together. What do you think, my friend—should I continue to call you Elk? Ser Elk. Or Elbert. Erreck. Eddard,” and he snorted hysterically. “Ethan. Eyron. Eustace…”

And so he whiled away the hours amusing himself like that. A man had to do what a man had to do, when sleep had become nothing more than a bygone memory.

Eventually, the sky began to tinge a dull rust-red, purpling the clouds. It was the next day, then. Benjen pulled himself to his feet and dusted the snow from his cloak, ready to wake the others, but then stopped. He frowned. No, that couldn’t be right. The color was wrong. He turned; to the east was still darkness, full of bright stars. The light was coming from the south, from beneath the clouds.

_Fire,_ Benjen realized.

The brightness spread across the horizon with the false triumph of dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SURPRISE, ANGST
> 
> see below for rant:  
> EPISODE 8X3! WHYYY


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